How Shame Drives Us into Addiction and Guilt Lifts Us Out
Nov 28, 2024
Shame and guilt are often looped together as the same thing. They are actually profoundly different. Shame drives us deeper into that pit of self-doubt and isolation, and guilt propels us out of it.
Shame and guilt are the deciding factors between staying trapped in addiction and finding your way out
Shame Drives Us into Addiction
When talking to a group of teachers at a conference, Brené Brown said this: “Shame is highly correlated with addiction, depression, violence, eating disorders, and suicide.”
Shame is debilitating. It tears at our self-worth and stomps on our capability. Well, it can’t actually destroy our worth or capability. What shame really does is destroy our perception of our worth and capability.
Shame puts all the awfulness of our mistakes and other people’s words directly on us. If we do something dumb, shame tells us we are dumb. If someone tells us we hurt them, shame applies that mistake directly to our identity; it says, “You are someone that hurts people. You’re a monster.” Even when the things other people are saying about us aren’t true, shame chimes in with an unhelpful “You’re unlikable.”
This negative self-talk that shame spews is a potent force that increases our risk of developing an addiction and our risk of staying trapped in addiction.
Shame’s beatdowns are agonizing. And when shame is the prominent voice in our heads, it’s almost unbearable, which drives us to find external forces that can numb and quiet shame’s words. That is how shame drives us into addiction. Its demands for reassurance can never be satisfied, so we look for buffers to muffle the noise. We may bury ourselves in drugs, pornography, social media doom-scrolling, and any other addiction you can think of to shut shame up.
When already in an addiction, shame’s insatiable demands for reassurance keep us there. We may be completely aware of the destruction our addiction is causing and still fall back into the behavior again and again. Because shame leads us to believe that we are nothing more than our behavior, so there is no way we have the strength or capacity to overcome it.
Guilt Lifts Us Out
Brené Brown’s quote continues with this: “And here’s the big piece you need to understand: guilt is inversely correlated with those outcomes… As it turns out, many researchers argue that guilt is actually a protective factor against things like addiction.
And here’s what a study from the National Library of Medicine has to say about the guilt and shame:
“Previous research has demonstrated that shame-proneness (the tendency to feel bad about the self) relates to a variety of life problems, whereas guilt-proneness (the tendency to feel bad about a specific behavior) is more likely to be adaptive… Across samples, shame-proneness was generally positively correlated with substance use problems, whereas guilt-proneness was inversely related (or unrelated) to substance use problems. Results suggest that shame and guilt should be considered separately in the prevention and treatment of substance misuse.”
Guilt is protective against addiction, and guilt is adaptive to adversity. Shame destroys our self-confidence and guilt builds it.
Instead of focusing the unpleasant attributes, consequences, and implications of our mistakes (and any other sources of unpleasant feelings: others’ opinions, our environment, unlucky circumstances… etc.) on ourselves, guilt applies it all to the mistakes. “I am not dumb, my behavior was dumb.” “I am not unlikable, those people just don’t like me.”
Guilt takes a healthier approach to the world than shame does. It clearly sees the wrongness and dumbness and hurt of our actions and the influence of the people and things around us, but it does not apply that wrongness and dumbness and hurt to our identity. Instead, it applies them to their sources. Because of this, guilt does something amazing for us; it upholds our beliefs about ourselves and our capability while also allowing us to see the things that need addressing in our lives. It says, “This is wrong, and you can overcome it.”
When we are addicted to something and shift our perspective to guilt instead of shame, the truth of our addiction (which was once debilitating) becomes a motivator that pushes us to do and hope for better.
Shame is the direct path to destructive behaviors like addiction, bullying, drug use, sexual promiscuity, and many others. Guilt is a direct path out.
Shame drives us into addiction, and Guilt emboldens us to climb out.
Related articles:
- You’re Not Addicted to Pornography, You’re Addicted to Shame
- The Definition of Sobriety
- Guilt vs. Shame
